November 03, 2007

Reality-check (Tut, tut...)

REMEMBER KING TUT? Some thirty years ago,
critics of the art world's institutional workings ominously forewarned
that the rise of the blockbuster exhibition—the showcase designed for
mass appeal, able to draw immense throngs into the gilded tombs of
history by taking up such iconic subjects as the ancient Egyptian ruler
or Impressionism—would be attended by the dilution of historical
discourse and the artistic community's public sphere. After all, how
could a meaningful, nuanced synthetic analysis of often profoundly
ambiguous contemporary concerns take place when exhibition spaces were
increasingly devoted to artists (if not to pharaohs) with the kind of
name recognition more typically associated with the most popular
commercial brands? Following the logic of a mass-production economy
based on volume, the institutions of art—whose success would soon come
to be measured almost exclusively in terms of audience size—were
obviously becoming the instrument of powerful economic forces already
dominating the culture at large.

Such a
protest might seem quaint to us, if only it hadn’t been so
prophetic—and, indeed, today's museum requires massive attendance
figures just to cover operating costs. So we would do well to look once
again at the art world's frequent mirroring of mass commerce,
particularly in light of the explosion of popular interest in
contemporary art during the past ten years. (Let's set aside for a
moment the question of whether art's public sphere has gone the way of
the pyramids.) For with this radical expansion, contemporary art has
seemed to follow a shift in the general culture from an economy of
scale to one steeped in customization (or at least the illusion
thereof). Even the most cursory look at the art world now—or at the
copious advertisements cradling this editor's letter—will glean a
cornucopia of artistic approaches manifested in a diverse assortment of
forms, media, and disciplines, wherein every practice (and all dialogue
around it) unavoidably risks becoming yet another niche market among
many.

To say this might seem at first merely to argue
that our day has seen an extension of the pluralism of the late '80s
and early '90s, when the coexistence of parallel or divergent artistic
strategies in contemporary art suggested there was no single coherent
historical strand or trajectory to which artists, critics, curators, or
collectors must necessarily respond. With contemporary art's
ever-widening circle, in other words, an array of artistic practices
became fiscally sustainable as so many fields of "interest"—and to each
his or her own taste. True enough. Of deeper consequence, however, are
the various ways in which art as a critical enterprise begins to
signify within this expanded field of taste, performing itself for
knowing audiences, always signaling, sometimes subtly and sometimes
not, its outsider (or cultish) status. It fulfills and affirms the
expectations and biases of its viewership, matching the contours of "art" within the broader terrain of mass commerce, where the unique,
transformative experience—formerly the purview of art alone—is given
primacy. (Note in this regard how art fairs have begun mimicking
biennials.) Following in the footsteps of so many subcultures of the
twentieth century, then, the criticality of artistic practices
typically registers less as subversion than as difference—something
that operates less in terms of effect than affect, or style. And with
its increasingly customized appeal, art becomes the redundant image,
even the advertisement, of itself.

Of course,
I write this letter in part because the same logic applies to this
magazine, whose very purpose is supposedly to render such redundancy
more visible, unfolding its implications not only for artistic
production but also for art's relationship with the culture at large.
In representing any artwork at all, the magazine makes it digestible;
and once a critical position is articulated here, another niche market
is potentially created. Additionally, just as an artwork may become
valued for its ostensible—even vocal—resistance to value, so
criticism might seem to explicate and critique art and culture while in
fact reaffirming the status quo. A question: Assuming that a
publication, by its very expository and disseminative nature, is fated
to perpetuate such cycling, how might it implicate that cycling
nonetheless?

To be fair, the art world and Artforum
are hardly alone in courting the image—and donning the attitude—of
criticality. We live in a society of style. (Consider, for example, the
increasing role of humor and entertainment in politically themed
programming, from Bill Maher to Jon Stewart, where laughter fosters a
sense of belonging and signals a kind of mutual accord, an affirmation
of shared and preexisting opinion—the making of audience into a
demographic marked by passivity.) Still, understood within artistic
circles, this proposition can be revelatory. Take Aaron Young's
ten-minute Greeting Card action this fall, a Tut-like affair if
there ever was one, taking place as it did in the glittering darkness
of the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York (and there

entombed amid the
supple honeys and totems of fashion and corporate sponsorships). But
rather than decry its spectacularity, we should note here that the
double allure implicit in conventions of art's unconventionality was on
full display: In the cavernous hall of the armory, Young had a dozen
professional bikers burn rubber on a 72-by-128-foot plywood floor,
stripping off layers of black paint to reveal a fluorescent orange,
yellow, and pink undercoat, thereby creating an interlacing network of
lines strongly reminiscent of BriceMarden's signature loops. The
neo-avant-garde recalcitrance appeared entirely intact, what with the
seeming antagonism of placing the deafening mechanical screams of a
motocross rally dead in the heart of Manhattan's hushed and moneyed
Upper East Side; and with the knowing art-historical nods to Michael
Heizer and Richard Prince, both of whom previously made work deploying
biker culture to bring high culture low. Yet, for his part, Young
clearly grasped neither his work nor its context, since the material
reality of the two was infinitely more provocative than anything put
forward here as "art." Exhaust produced by squandered fuel gulched into
the rafters; gas masks were handed out to well-heeled onlookers for
protection against the fumes. And so the true critical potential here
was obvious but left incidental, tipping grossly into parody: While the
front page of the New York Times was likely featuring, on the very day of Greeting Card,
reports of rising oil prices, of a raging war in Iraq,

of rapid global
warming, or of health hazards due to the air quality in Lower
Manhattan, here was an artist who would underline the liminal disaster
that is this age—if only by making visible and then inhaling deeply
this historical moment's acrid air, and by forcing his audience to do
the same, however unwittingly.

But that would
be a myth worthy of Tut himself. As it was, Young merely placed his
public performance at the service of painting, dividing his floor into
sections to be sold to collectors, first come, first served. Even so,
money in art is not what's at stake here. Rather, in the wake of
customization throughout culture, it is the need for an art—and for a
criticism—that is something other than a rhetorical device.

Comments

REMEMBER KING TUT? Some thirty years ago,
critics of the art world's institutional workings ominously forewarned
that the rise of the blockbuster exhibition—the showcase designed for
mass appeal, able to draw immense throngs into the gilded tombs of
history by taking up such iconic subjects as the ancient Egyptian ruler
or Impressionism—would be attended by the dilution of historical
discourse and the artistic community's public sphere. After all, how
could a meaningful, nuanced synthetic analysis of often profoundly
ambiguous contemporary concerns take place when exhibition spaces were
increasingly devoted to artists (if not to pharaohs) with the kind of
name recognition more typically associated with the most popular
commercial brands? Following the logic of a mass-production economy
based on volume, the institutions of art—whose success would soon come
to be measured almost exclusively in terms of audience size—were
obviously becoming the instrument of powerful economic forces already
dominating the culture at large.

Such a
protest might seem quaint to us, if only it hadn’t been so
prophetic—and, indeed, today's museum requires massive attendance
figures just to cover operating costs. So we would do well to look once
again at the art world's frequent mirroring of mass commerce,
particularly in light of the explosion of popular interest in
contemporary art during the past ten years. (Let's set aside for a
moment the question of whether art's public sphere has gone the way of
the pyramids.) For with this radical expansion, contemporary art has
seemed to follow a shift in the general culture from an economy of
scale to one steeped in customization (or at least the illusion
thereof). Even the most cursory look at the art world now—or at the
copious advertisements cradling this editor's letter—will glean a
cornucopia of artistic approaches manifested in a diverse assortment of
forms, media, and disciplines, wherein every practice (and all dialogue
around it) unavoidably risks becoming yet another niche market among
many.

To say this might seem at first merely to argue
that our day has seen an extension of the pluralism of the late '80s
and early '90s, when the coexistence of parallel or divergent artistic
strategies in contemporary art suggested there was no single coherent
historical strand or trajectory to which artists, critics, curators, or
collectors must necessarily respond. With contemporary art's
ever-widening circle, in other words, an array of artistic practices
became fiscally sustainable as so many fields of "interest"—and to each
his or her own taste. True enough. Of deeper consequence, however, are
the various ways in which art as a critical enterprise begins to
signify within this expanded field of taste, performing itself for
knowing audiences, always signaling, sometimes subtly and sometimes
not, its outsider (or cultish) status. It fulfills and affirms the
expectations and biases of its viewership, matching the contours of "art" within the broader terrain of mass commerce, where the unique,
transformative experience—formerly the purview of art alone—is given
primacy. (Note in this regard how art fairs have begun mimicking
biennials.) Following in the footsteps of so many subcultures of the
twentieth century, then, the criticality of artistic practices
typically registers less as subversion than as difference—something
that operates less in terms of effect than affect, or style. And with
its increasingly customized appeal, art becomes the redundant image,
even the advertisement, of itself.

Of course,
I write this letter in part because the same logic applies to this
magazine, whose very purpose is supposedly to render such redundancy
more visible, unfolding its implications not only for artistic
production but also for art's relationship with the culture at large.
In representing any artwork at all, the magazine makes it digestible;
and once a critical position is articulated here, another niche market
is potentially created. Additionally, just as an artwork may become
valued for its ostensible—even vocal—resistance to value, so
criticism might seem to explicate and critique art and culture while in
fact reaffirming the status quo. A question: Assuming that a
publication, by its very expository and disseminative nature, is fated
to perpetuate such cycling, how might it implicate that cycling
nonetheless?

To be fair, the art world and Artforum
are hardly alone in courting the image—and donning the attitude—of
criticality. We live in a society of style. (Consider, for example, the
increasing role of humor and entertainment in politically themed
programming, from Bill Maher to Jon Stewart, where laughter fosters a
sense of belonging and signals a kind of mutual accord, an affirmation
of shared and preexisting opinion—the making of audience into a
demographic marked by passivity.) Still, understood within artistic
circles, this proposition can be revelatory. Take Aaron Young's
ten-minute Greeting Card action this fall, a Tut-like affair if
there ever was one, taking place as it did in the glittering darkness
of the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York (and there

entombed amid the
supple honeys and totems of fashion and corporate sponsorships). But
rather than decry its spectacularity, we should note here that the
double allure implicit in conventions of art's unconventionality was on
full display: In the cavernous hall of the armory, Young had a dozen
professional bikers burn rubber on a 72-by-128-foot plywood floor,
stripping off layers of black paint to reveal a fluorescent orange,
yellow, and pink undercoat, thereby creating an interlacing network of
lines strongly reminiscent of BriceMarden's signature loops. The
neo-avant-garde recalcitrance appeared entirely intact, what with the
seeming antagonism of placing the deafening mechanical screams of a
motocross rally dead in the heart of Manhattan's hushed and moneyed
Upper East Side; and with the knowing art-historical nods to Michael
Heizer and Richard Prince, both of whom previously made work deploying
biker culture to bring high culture low. Yet, for his part, Young
clearly grasped neither his work nor its context, since the material
reality of the two was infinitely more provocative than anything put
forward here as "art." Exhaust produced by squandered fuel gulched into
the rafters; gas masks were handed out to well-heeled onlookers for
protection against the fumes. And so the true critical potential here
was obvious but left incidental, tipping grossly into parody: While the
front page of the New York Times was likely featuring, on the very day of Greeting Card,
reports of rising oil prices, of a raging war in Iraq,

of rapid global
warming, or of health hazards due to the air quality in Lower
Manhattan, here was an artist who would underline the liminal disaster
that is this age—if only by making visible and then inhaling deeply
this historical moment's acrid air, and by forcing his audience to do
the same, however unwittingly.

But that would
be a myth worthy of Tut himself. As it was, Young merely placed his
public performance at the service of painting, dividing his floor into
sections to be sold to collectors, first come, first served. Even so,
money in art is not what's at stake here. Rather, in the wake of
customization throughout culture, it is the need for an art—and for a
criticism—that is something other than a rhetorical device.